New Markets

Tomorrow’s Insurance Products Are Being Developed Today

Hurricanes, Capital, Agents and Technology Feed the Product Process

Looking for a new market? Most people in the industry are, including those who get paid to come up with new insurance products.

According to these product idea experts, what ends up in insurers’ and agents’ portfolios as new products could be shaped by the recent hurricanes, the latest technology, feedback from agents and customers, the availability of capital, the actions of competitors and changes in laws.

Developing new markets

Lexington Insurance Company, a member company of American International Group, has carved its place in the property/casualty marketplace as new product maker. It even boasts in its tag line: “market leadership powered by the spirit of innovation.”

“There are constantly ‘new markets’ developing,” said Tracey Sharis, director of product development at Lexington Insurance. “Whether they’re billion dollar insurance lines or whether they’re items that become endorsements to your traditional coverages-it’s just a question of the magnitude of that coverage.”

Sharis said that Lexington identifies new market opportunities by evaluating four main four main areas.

First, she said the company must pay attention to needs of their insureds and their brokers. “Listening to what their new and emerging needs might be” is important, she said.

Second, understanding the trends in the world marketplace and what the insurance implications of those trends might be. She said Lexington consults with strategic thinkers, or futurists, to identify trends both demographically and geographically.

A third way new products are developed stems from changes in legislation or the regulatory environment.

The fourth way Lexington identifies new market opportunities is by zeroing in on market needs that follow catastrophes.

“The best example of that would be post 9/11 when the marketplace as a whole pulled back from providing terrorism insurance in general,” she said. “AIG responded very quickly with insurance that satisfied the heightened awareness of our customers to that exposure.”

Changes for the future

Joe Harrington, director of corporate communication, of Wheaton, Ill.-based American Association of Insurance Services, said there are three things happening today in the industry that will likely affect all insurance product development in the future.

“One is the new public scrutiny of property insurance in the wake of hurricane Katrina, and the hurricanes that followed,” Harrington said. “Particularly public officials at the state level are asking whether certain excluded perils of residential policies should be covered and in essence spread across the country, the risk and premium.”

Harrington noted that if a national catastrophe plan comes to fruition, it could result in far reaching changes across the industry, although “it’s far from clear that it would.”

Also, the state of Florida recently enacted a law seeking a common residential property policy. “One of the issues is wind versus water damage and that could have a profound impact on writing of property damage nationwide,” Harrington said.

Another issue that Harrington said might have an impact on the future of product development is the use of catastrophe models and the scrutiny surrounding them today.

“With the four hurricanes last year, plus the natural disasters this year, insurers and reinsurers that have used catastrophe modeling to gauge their exposures have had an opportunity to see where they worked and where they came up short,” he said. “The use of cat models is an indication that the industry recognizes that it needs to go beyond historic loss data to calculate certain exposures.” He added that the recent mega-catastrophes mark the beginning of a more “permanent fine tuning” of modeling tools.

Another product development trend Harrington observed in 2005 is the market shift to risk specific underwriting as opposed to class specific underwriting.

“There’s no question that now with the use of data mining, in what’s called predictive analytics, insurers and those that serve them are looking to identify characteristics of individual risks and underwriting them using automated tools rather than relying solely on categorizations,” he said.

Harrington added that it’s certainly not the end of class underwriting. “But the ability to assess individual risk characteristics through automated means is going to profoundly change how insurers see their markets,” he noted.